Francesco and Jerry LRC,
Thanks for both of your comments. They are critical for resolving
these issues.
FB
In R 295, a draft of the "Prolegomena", Peirce says:
CSP: The first member of the triplet, the “Seme,” embraces the
logical Term, the Subject or Object of a sentence, everything
of any kind, be it a man or a scribed character, such as h or Pb,
which will serve or is supposed to serve, for some purpose, as a
substitute for its Object. (R 295, p. 26ff)
To resolve these issues, we need to determine exactly how Peirce
would translate "logical Term" to existential graphs. Does it
mean the bare predicate or the predicate plus a line of identity?
JLRC
If my memory serves me correctly, the word “term" derives from the
middle ages, perhaps Peter of Spain? It is a shortened form of
the word “terminus” which simply represents the beginning and ending
of a sentence.
Yes. Petrus Hispanus was the author of "Summulae Logicales" (1239).
For the next six centuries, every textbook on logic was copied from
or influenced by it. That includes Whateley's book, which Peirce
read cover to cover in one week when he was 13 years old.
In his letter to Kehler (1911), Peirce showed exactly how the subject
and predicate terms of a syllogism are translated to an EG. See
NEM 3:168, 169 (pp. 8, 9 of http://jfsowa.com/peirce/eg1911.pdf ).
On p. 3:168, he wrote "Fig. 11 shows the two premisses "Any S is M"
and "Any M is P." In the traditional terminology, S is the subject
term, M is the middle term, and P is the predicate term. If you
look at the Fig. 11 to 17, all three terms are monads. Since M
is represented in exactly the same way in subject position or
predicate position, that indicates that a "logical term" is just
the monad by itself, independent of the line or ligature.
FB
I refomulate Claims #1 and #2 as follows:
Claim #1: every rheme is a seme, but not every seme is a rheme;
the subject of a sentence is a seme (R 295) but not a rheme
(at least, not a rheme in the sense in which rhemes were defined,
e.g., in 1903).
Claim #2: 'Seme' includes predicates and quasi-predicates, but
not subjects of sentences. The subject of a sentence is not a seme.
The problem with this formulation is the ambiguity of the words
'subject' and 'predicate' in Aristotelian logic, 20th c logics.
and English grammar. Since Peirce was writing during the transition,
his English sometimes obscures the meaning. But his translation to
EGs is always precise.
My hypothesis: I don't believe that Peirce intended a seme to
include a line of identity that identifies a particular individual.
For my Claim #2, I'll delete the word 'subject' because it's highly
ambiguous. Instead, I would say:
Claim #2: 'Seme' includes predicates and quasi-predicates,
but not a ligature or line of identity.
In any case, there is more to say.
John
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